I love to watch
TED videos.
Yesterday I watched the TED video where Johnny Lee does his Wiimote Hacks:
He was a PhD student who figured out how the Wii remote video game controller worked and used it to create a digital whiteboard, and a virtual reality device. Here is his Projects page. Then, instead of presenting them in a paper, he put the video on YouTube and it is consistently in the top 10 of videos.
Now he works for Microsoft. He is interviewed in the NYT today, and says some interesting things about innovation.
"He chooses his personal projects based on what he calls their 'work-to-wow' ratio. 'I want to get the biggest wow for the smallest amount of work,' he explains, adding that for him, wow is synonymous with impact. Mr. Lee encourages innovators to ask themselves, 'Would providing 80 percent of the capability at 1 percent of the cost be valuable to someone?' If the answer is yes, he says, pay attention. Trading relatively little performance for substantial cost savings can generate what Mr. Lee calls 'surprising and often powerful results both scientifically and socially.'”